mostly true . partly true . totally true . too true for comfort . as they happen . sometimes later . in no particular order . celebrations . commisserations . contemplations . mostly about the natural world and getting along in it

Tuesday, May 13, 2008

Scanning

Every scene is rich in detail, but each person has their attention first drawn to some specific thing within the scene and usually then considers the scene to be seen. But there is so much more there than the first thing that grabs your attention. To see more, you can learn to scan. First you have to pause on your journey. This will take the motion of your body through the space out of the equation and it will allow you to move your eyes through the scene to take in the details of a time and place. You can observe the scene using a variety of scanning patterns. In a natural scene, a good pattern to use is to scan from foreground through the layers to background. You can scan a scene from low to high. You can scan left to right. As you scan, you stop your eyes and really focus on what is there at each little step. The point is to stop your eye in little increments and really notice what is there at each stopping point. People tend to always look at the same sort of things. Most keep their eyes on the path for most of a walk and look up occasionally at maybe the canopy of the trees or the forest floor for wildflowers. But if you stop to scan, you sell see the leaf litter and the fallen logs and the stuff growing on the fallen logs and the shelf fungus growing on the trunks of the trees and the nest in the branches of the tree and the clouds beyond the tree. All that diversity and variety is there, waiting to be discovered and enjoyed, and it is up to you to change your patterns of looking so that you can see more of what was there all along. Scan your world and discover the delightful details. Remember to work on it in a systematic manner until it becomes habit.